Uncluttered

An Olafur Eliasson retrospective.

“I Only See Things When They Move” (2004), left, and three views of “360° Room for All Colors” (2002). Eliasson, at far right, sometimes allows himself a theatrical illusion, such as when enveloping hues shift like weather on a neon planet. Photographs by Gus Powell.

Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic inventor and engineer of minimalist spectacle, is so much better than anyone else in today’s ranks of crowd-pleasing installational artists that there should be a nice, clean, special word other than “art” for what he does, to set him apart. There won’t be. “Art” has become the promiscuous catchall for anything artificial that meets no practical need but which we like, or are presumed or supposed to like. Still, play with the thought at “Take Your Time,” the Eliasson retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and at MOMA’s affiliate, P.S. 1. By the way, please make the P.S. 1 trek—three stops on the No. 7 train from Grand Central. That part of the show details and deepens a sense of Eliasson’s creative integrity, which may remain slightly in question amid his stunts on West Fifty-third Street: an electric fan swaying on a cord from the ceiling of the atrium, rooms awash in different kinds of peculiarly colored light, a wall of exotic (and odorous) moss, a curtain of falling water optically immobilized by stroboscopic flashes. I had a little epiphany in Queens while looking at Eliasson’s contemplative suites of photographs of Icelandic landscapes, seascapes, glaciers, icebergs, and caves: here’s someone for whom beauty is normal. His character suggests both the mental discipline of a scientist and the emotional responsibility of a poet. If leadership in public-spirited art extravaganzas were a political office—and it sometimes feels as if it were—he’d have my vote.

Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967 to Icelandic parents, an artist father and a mother who was a seamstress. They separated when he was three years old. His father returned to Iceland and lived in the countryside; Eliasson spent his holidays there while growing up. He received a degree from the Royal Danish Academy of Arts in 1995, after having moved in 1993 to Cologne for a year, and then to Berlin, where he maintains a well-staffed studio that is part laboratory and part factory. These days, the indispensable skills of a globe-trotting artist are as much managerial as technical. Eliasson seems highly adept at firing up his many collaborators, such as Madeleine Grynsztejn, who was until recently a senior curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the show originated, and the MOMA curators Roxana Marcoci and Klaus Biesenbach, who oversaw its incarnation here and have mounted a concurrent show, “Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s,” to sketch the artist’s historical pedigree. (Walking me through the shows, Marcoci and Biesenbach bubbled with enthusiasm, and pretty soon so did I.) Among other believers are the municipal officials, including Mayor Bloomberg, who have signed off on the incipient whoop-de-do of four colossal mechanical waterfalls to be set up at different sites in New York Harbor in late June, for a three-month run.

There is an earlier waterfall by Eliasson at P.S. 1, “Reversed Waterfall” (1998), which happens to flow uphill. There’s no mystery about it. The requisite awkward system of troughs, spouts, and pumps is mostly visible—an example of classically post-minimalist procedural candor. (Dating from the late nineteen-sixties, that principle obliged you, if your work was, say, electrical, to expose the cord and the plug.) Eliasson sometimes allows himself a theatrical illusion, as in a circular installation at MOMA, “360° Room for All Colors” (2002), in which enveloping hues shift like the weather on a neon planet, and you can’t see how it’s done. More usual is “1m3 Light” (1999), also at MOMA, in which spotlights and a fog machine plainly account for the apparition of a luminous white cube in the air. Likewise self-evident is the nearby “Room for One Color” (1997), a corridor lit by yellow monofrequency tubes, which suppress all other colors and startlingly clarify your vision of your fellow-viewers. Then there’s that locomotive fan, “Ventilator” (1997), a witty finesse of the MOMA atrium’s space-splurging grandiosity. Propelling around on a course dramatically varied by ambient air currents—at some moments a vicious zoom, at others an indecisive hovering—the fan becomes an economical point of fascination that makes the space feel designed for nothing else. Its equivalent at P.S. 1 is “Take Your Time” (2008), a vast, overhead, tilted disk of mirrored plastic that rotates slowly, gradually giving rise to lovely, subtly disorienting effects which register best when you lie flat on the floor—a posture familiar from Eliasson’s 2003 installation of a synthetic sun and a mirrored ceiling at London’s Tate Modern, which regularly induced a beach- or disaster-scene-like sprawl of spectators. As I relaxed on my back at P.S. 1, gazing up, my senses percolated a conviction that the disk was motionless and that the building and thus, by logical extension, planet Earth were turning on a new axis. This struck me, dreamily, as a fine solution to the world’s problems.

What are these works, besides fun? Perhaps not much, in themselves. They are choice instances of institutionally parasitic art that exists only because space-rich, audience-hungry museums and Kunsthallen must fill their schedules with something, and preferably not the inefficiently small and expensively insured objects that are traditional paintings and sculptures. I have been unhappy with the reign of such circusy manifestations, which are called into being less by anyone’s desire than as fulfillments of a job description. (Our jobs constrict us. Art should give us compensatory glimpses of freedom.) But there is a lyrical aura to any job that is done really well, and Eliasson routinely distills that aura into a Platonic essence of know-how and impeccable execution. The effect is generous and perhaps salubriously contagious. (Let’s all be better at what we do!) But the clincher, for me, is the negative virtue of Eliasson’s matter-of-factness, which more than refreshes in a type of art that commonly features strenuous myth and message. He refrains from burdening us with implications of mystical portent—a weak suit of intermittently impressive artist-shamans from Joseph Beuys to Matthew Barney—or, like hosts of the politically righteous, with exhortations to improve our moral hygiene. Eliasson isn’t entirely immune to social-therapeutic rhetoric—that would be asking a lot of a Scandinavian—as witness the nudgy title “Take Your Time.” (I will do as I please with my time, thanks.) But when he works, he is all honesty.

There is an intellectually stimulating tension between the historical show “Geometry of Motion” and a simulated workshop at P.S. 1 that displays scores of experimental geometric models and maquettes from Eliasson’s busy hands. It bespeaks the trajectory of a modern tradition, grounded in Constructivism and the Bauhaus, with impudent input from Dada. One of Marcel Duchamp’s optical japes, the mildly hypnotic spinning disks called “Rotoreliefs” (1935), dominates a room that includes apposite works by Hans Richter and László Moholy-Nagy. Prominent among more recent forebears are Robert Irwin, the innovator of “space and light” installation, and Gordon Matta-Clark, represented here by photographs of his delicate chain-saw alterations of derelict buildings. Neglected of late, the tradition of mechanically engineered abstraction embraced two ideals: utopia and science. The first seems irrecoverable, things being as they are, but the second feels newly promising, in a time when technological advances outpace our imaginative resources. Eliasson is entertaining, yet his central concern seems less a working of spectacular magic than an investigation of how spectacular magic works. He raises awareness of the neurological susceptibilities that condition all of what we see and may think we know. This can be humiliating, as it often is in encounters with the menacingly proportioned spaces, grim videos, and noise assaults of Bruce Nauman, the greatest of post-minimalist explorers, whose influence Eliasson is quick to acknowledge. But with Eliasson the experience of our perceptual frailties rewards simple, open-minded humility.

There’s a power in discovering the limits of our powers, especially in letting go of delusions that reality is emotionally either comprehensible or somehow alien. Eliasson’s beautiful Iceland photographs brought this home to me. They advertise the benefits of an uncluttered mind. It helps that the subject is Iceland, which, aside from Eliasson’s intimacy with it, is one of the few places in the world where nature remains largely untouched, not only by human habitation but by all-too-human conceit, as in sentimental projections of “wilderness.” Nothing can be wild to you unless you consent to feel tame. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic.